From Russia, With Love (Vote Trump!)

If you look at the Languages report in Google Analytics, you may have seen something amusing pop up right after the US elections…

I would not suggest visiting the URL mentioned in the language name.

This traffic is primarily from Russia, which is hardly a surprise. My guess is some spammers are having a little fun with the narrative of Russian involvement in the US election. In classic Russian fashion, they were late on launching the effort.

On every property where I’m seeing this, it’s a minimal % of total traffic. But it’s annoying nonetheless. Depending on your server, I’m sure you can isolate and block this traffic easily enough (I often block entire ranges of Russian and Chinese IPs due to this nonsense). It’s very easy to filter out of GA though. Simply create a custom Exclude filter using “Language Settings” as your filter field. Filter pattern is Secret\.ɢoogle\.com.*